New Guides Aim to Become the Yelp for MOOC’s

By Alisha Azevedo. Students looking for massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, have many options, with a growing number of providers and course titles. A handful of Web sites have popped up over the past few months to help students find courses they’re interested in, much as a restaurant-goer might turn to Yelp. Some of the sites let students review the MOOC’s they’ve taken, incorporating their views into the sites’ overall guidance.
One new directory, Course Buffet, was started two months ago by Bruce Bolton, out of his frustration over trying to compare the quality of online resources. The site lists more than 500 courses from various MOOC providers, and each course is assigned a difficulty level (Psychology 100, for example), to help students move from easier to more difficult material. He hopes to turn a profit by selling advertising, such as by sending offers from certification companies to students.
Mr. Bolton plans to add an online-transcript feature to show a list of MOOC’s a user has completed, he said. “There’s no way to prove you have taken all those courses—we’ll have to work on that,” he said. “But it gives you something to show people.”
Another site, Class Central, groups online-course listings into one page of tables categorized by the dates they are offered. Dhawal Shah, the site’s founder, works as a Bay Area software engineer by day and takes MOOC’s at night. He began working on Class Central last November and built up an audience through hits from sites like Hacker News and Reddit. Read more...